Guild Wars 2

This is more of a thematic/quality of life complaint rather than a ‘balance’ complaint, but it can sometimes bleed into the latter. I understand that Staff is mostly supposed to function as a support weapon, and that’s fine. I also get that Attunement-dancing is typically considered optimal, and am fine with that as well.

However, what really seems off in PvE particularly is that Fire consistently feels like the only viable fallback attunement. Earth and Water have effective skills, but staying in them for any length of time just causes you to lose huge amounts of DPS in exchange for situational utility. Air, meanwhile, is just altogether gimpy. I shouldn’t have to always switch back to Fire just to kill a couple of regular mobs within a reasonable period of time.

For Earth and Water, it’s primarily the weakness of the autoattacks that seems to be the biggest part of the problem. It makes sense that they are weaker than Fire and Air, but the gap is way bigger than it needs to be or should be. I would strongly recommend a significant buff to the damage of both so that you can be at least marginally effective in them for longer than it takes to burn their cooldowns and can effectively play a ‘Water Mage’ or an ‘Earth Mage’.

Air is just poorly balanced all around. Every skill but Static Field needs some degree of retuning. Chain Lightning is too weak compared to Fireball and either needs a speed buff or a total redesign. Lightning Surge has too long of a cast time to be practical in most situations. Swirling Winds is okay, but it just isn’t that useful very often. Gust is cool, but it has a poor hit box and really should do modest damage.

The problem actually exists for other weapons in the Ele’s kitten nal as well, but it’s most egregious with the Staff.

It’s a core problem with the skill design of elementalists. Instead of getting 4 full weapon sets, the elementalist has access to 20 “half-skills” (either being half as effective or having double cooldown compared to similar skills of other classes).

If every attunement bar was “self-contained” the 12s attunement cooldown (or even the old 15s cooldown) would be justified. Engineers have also niche weapon bars (Med Kit, Elixir Gun), but can switch on a 1s gcd.

a little bit of a dream sheet of mine for staff skills:

staff earth skills:

1: make this piercing so it can hit multiple targets, also add 1 stack vulnerability 4s
2: reduce the time between the cast and the blast finisher, or add a channel that when complete, buffs the bleed by another few stacks and/or increase the initial blast damage by 2x
3: add retaliation for 5s
4: add poison field for 3s
5: enable piercing to allow for multiple targets. “shockwave.” sounds like it should be AoE

staff air skills:

1: add 4s vulnerability, and add swiftness (4s) to allies it touches
2: blast finisher 20% chance (or more)
3: projectile finisher
4: add quickness (3s) to allies

staff water:

2: blast finisher 20% chance (or more)

staff fire:

1: blast finisher 20% chance

i can’t really offer any suggestions to D /D or S /C as my ele only uses staff (RP reasons)

as for cantrips, since they have the longest cooldowns of similiar skills among all the classes:

armour of earth: grant nearby allies stability and protection
arcane shield: change to function like guardian shield 5 skill. allowing the elementalist to detonate the shield early for damage on command via skill press.
mist form: increase duration to 5 seconds, allow the elementalist to cancel early and gain retaliation (or regeneration) for 5 seconds